Monday, April 2, 2018

With A Little More Love

A friend of mine who worked at Elle once told me about an article they ran in which they showed a
whole bunch of different men photos of the same woman, photoshopped into different
hairstyles and outfits, and asked them to which woman they were most attracted.
They asked all kinds of people -- business men, students, stevedores, punks --
and every one of them said they were most attracted to the lady when she was wearing
a fluffy pale blue angora sweater.

That story reminds me of the music of Olivia Newton-John,
the Australian singer who epitomizes, both visually and vocally, a fluffy pale
blue angora sweater. When I was a little girl, in the 1970s, her music was
ubiquitous on the radio. She sang soft, soft songs about lurve in a quavery, fluttery voice, and they were all massive,
massive hits, because she was the Katy Perry of her era – only whiter and more
bland, if you can imagine such a thing.

I always used to think she was supposed to be G rated, but
in retrospect, I see how wrong that was. Indeed, even now my discomfort with
her music is probably because she was so palpably packaged as the perfect subject
of some horrid old man’s wet dream. Emanating out of her every breathy vocal
was weakness, vulnerability, and submission. The lyrics to the songs were like “Sex
And The City” scripts gone awry, in which the protagonist, i.e. Olivia, offers
herself up to men as a genus, promising endless, “hopeless” devotion and deep
well of anxiety to boot. For what is a lyric like her aching couplet, “on those
days when nobody wants to know you/and your smiles keep falling on stony ground”
if not an ode to all the women in the world who have been forever chastised for
frowning, who are never allowed to just flaunt their natural resting bitch
face, who would like to roll their eyes or slap someone’s hand back, but
instead, just smile and laugh?

Or so I used to think.

Newton-John was always way too pretty and innocent to hate on
very hard, but despite the absolute blanket nature of her presence in the world
– “Grease” is literally one of the best-selling
albums of all time ever -- her work didn’t really stick around the zeitgeist. In
her later years, she became more of a real person, both as a cancer survivor
and advocate for various humanitarian causes. But she came back to my attention
recently because former Blake Babies bassist Juliana Hatfield has just released a record on which she covers all these hit songs, and it’s fantastic. Hatfield says in
her liner notes that she has always found Newton-John’s work inspiring and
positive, and that completely virtuous stance shines through in her
interpretations of it: there’s nothing cynical or kitschy in her choice of artist. Unlike the usual goofy ‘70s covers many bands choose, there’s absolutely
no irony here: instead, Hatfield successfully injects her vision into ours, so that, at the end of the record, rather than
dismissing her, we learn to have that same kind of faith in her too.

In other words, rather than cover Newton-John’s music,
Juliana Hatfield reclaims it, singing these songs as they should be sung and
performed – exactly as they could have been performed, had the era not dictated
that fluffy blue angora sweater mic setting that so offends me even now. On
these new versions, the quaver is gone, as are the fluttering, downcast eyelids
(or their vocal equivalent.) In Hatfield’s version, the singer looks straight
into her object’s eyes, and tells them what they need to know. Thus, in
Hatfield’s mouth, the statement “I honestly love you” sounds like a powerful
assertion, rather than a doormat’s squeak, and “Have you never been mellow?”
sounds like a really pertinent question with an answer that’s going to
change your life.

It’s not really surprising that these versions sound more
assertive than Olivia Newton-John's, of course. Hatfield’s own work, from the Blake Babies
through to her most recent collaboration The I Don’t Cares, aligns a little bit
more towards punk antecedents than to mainstream country rock kitsch. Also, she plays
guitar and sings on all the songs here, except the ones in which, Prince-like, she
plays bass and drums as well, and that is another thing that sets these
versions apart from their originals. Divorced from their orchestral settings
and blah 70s tempos, performed in a rock trio format by an accomplished
musician of the grunge era, the material on this record sounds like a Pazz
& Jop finalist circa 1996: like Veruca Salt, or Liz Phair, or the Breeders,
or Hatfield’s former band the Blake Babies. The way she’s arranged them is
spare and uncompromising, with guitar chords that get leaned into, and singing
that sounds unaffected and clean, and for me, that changes them into serious
music that I want to listen to over and over. Indeed, it turns out that Newton-John’s
songs themselves are exactly what Hatfield claimed for them – i.e. positive and
inspirational.

Of course, there’s maybe a little bit of a gut level
nostalgia that goes into to liking this music: I probably like hearing poppy
hit songs like “Magic” or “A Little More Love” more than most, because it takes
me back to when I was really little and listened to this stuff on the car radio
of my brother’s red barracuda – and because I was a Blake Babies fan. But it
also made me rethink some things about that era, and how it differs so
radically from now. Most of all, it reminds me of how one of my TAs at UC
Berkeley once pulled me aside and said, that she’d like me to stop responding
in class with remarks that I phrased as questions instead of statements. Her
name was Andrea, and she told me that I should get rid of the upwards tilt to
my voice every time I raised my hand.

I don’t always succeed at that, even today, but I try really
hard to, and I think Juliana Hatfield does too. On this record, at least, she’s taken the
question marks off these lyrics and turned them into audible declarations.